THE BUTCHER AND HIS PLUM. WHE HEN valour weds beauty, and beauty has gold, In Consols or wares, Or, in fine, any shape in which money can come. When you glance at the picture over the page : These outline engravings effective are reckoned— That is, when they're limned by George Cruikshank the Second. Tableau the first. To a marvellous size The plum has swelled, is swelling, On that plum and its growth are dwelling. From mansions Belgravian and West End Square; Saint and soldier, poet and sage, See, how awe-smitten they raise their brows and Tableau the second. The conqueror comes, That is in the way Which the satirist, born at Aquinum, When beheld in a social parvenu. And the crowds which gazed now draw him along With voice of music and note of song. 'Way, make way, a divinity comes, Butcher of butchers, and plum of plums!' Hark, let the echoing cheer go round 'Tis grown to four hundred thousand pound! Tableau the third. King Carnifex see, as Flowery chaplets round him twined. Moloch, or Baal, or Juggernaut, he The base of his godhead, L. S. D.; By a process strange and stilly, on, It has reached the worth Of sovereigns just forty million! But what is the sequel? see tableau the last; Like a dream it has come, like a dream it has passed; These grew with the plum, with the plum they have died; In the zenith rare of those aureous days, In slumbers oblivious insensibly wrapt, A tragical end On awakening found from the sinister snooze, Through the plains of light, Of his fawners and flatt'rers the parasite crews, And, unhallowed shapes, Imps, demons, and apes, He saw grinning at him above and around : Which he wore yesterday Lay a chaos of moth-eaten rags on the ground; MORAL. A moral there is, which I think itself states Pretty plainly throughout this whole series of plates, Our artist alludes to some facts most historical; The moral, I think, is as much as to say, If the prices which butchers compel us to pay Financial salvation The tables completely turned round shall display, T. H. S. ESCOTT. |